MEXICO: THE 51ST STATE
By Richard ReevesLONDON -- Across the English
Channel, young men are massing near the beaches of Dunkirk, desperately
seeking boats and boatmen to carry them across to England before it is
too late.

This is not 1940, when British
boats large and small bravely crossed the choppy channel to rescue more
than 300,000 of their own soldiers trapped by Hitler's army. This is now,
and the brave young men are refugees, from Asia and Africa and the poorer
parts of southern Europe, who want asylum and, more important, work in
Britain.

And back home in the United
States, along the borders of Texas and California, young men from Central
America are doing the same thing. And this is not the 1840s, when the armies
of Mexican Gen. Santa Anna and American Gen. Zachary Taylor faced off across
the Rio Grande.

In Washington, the new president
of Mexico, Vicente Fox (news - web sites), spoke to the U.S. Congress last
Thursday, in both Spanish and English, urging the Americans to let his
people come, give migrant workers, and illegal immigrants too, documents
to make them legal residents of the United States. Afterward Sen. Joseph
Lieberman (news - bio - voting record), D-Conn., came out and spoke a truth
that seems harsh to many: "The bottom line is that the fences are going
to go down between these two countries. And it is in the interest of both
countries that we make it work."

I had no idea Sen. Lieberman
was such a visionary. That vision may not be popular now -- perhaps it
never will be -- but the truth is that Mexico is going to become part of
the United States because the countries need each other -- or more precisely,
and for obvious reasons, they cannot break away from each other. There
they are, across 1,946 miles of river, desert and roads, and here we are.

Fox dreams of joining his
country to the prosperity of the United States, as Santa Anna fought, unsuccessfully,
to keep the potential of Texas and California when they were legally part
of Mexico. That's obvious. But what's in it for us? Peace and more prosperity.
We can't afford to have a poor and comparatively unstable country on our
border. It is just too much trouble -- and there is more trouble latent
in the countries south of Mexico. To Guatemala and then on to Honduras
and Nicaragua, Mexico is not so much on the way to the United States as
it is the biggest and richest country in their immediate part of the world.
And we need those people, because they are younger than our aging population
and because they are willing to do jobs Americans will no longer do.

That is what is happening
all over the world. That is why young men from Pakistan and Nigeria are
standing by the channel at Dunkirk. People are on the move everywhere,
and it is economic movement, not political. The only way a developed country,
the United States or Britain or France, can block those young men is by
force and not by law.

"Experts agree," wrote The
Daily Telegraph in London last week, "that if illegal immigrants -- and
asylum seekers working illegally -- were somehow prevented from working
in the United Kingdom, they would not come. Certainly, stopping or reducing
welfare payments has had little impact. ... Moreover, the UK economy has
a near insatiable demand for labor."

But this is not about such
things -- if it were, there would not be tens of millions of Irish-Americans
and Italian-Americans. It is about work. We have it, they want it, so they
will come -- unless we are willing to resist forcibly, and by that I mean
militarily as a police state. That is how it has usually been, and how
it will always be now with the development of available and affordable
global transportation.

September 3

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A worker shows a can of stewed crocodile meat blended with Chinese
herbs and black mushrooms as the other cuts crocodile meat at a crocodile
farm in Nakhon Pathom province, 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of Bangkok,
Thailand. Already a big business in other countries including Australia,
selling crocodile meat is starting in Thailand, Thai supermarkets will
begin selling for the first time a can of crocodile at Baht 200 (4.55 $US)
in early September.

September 4

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A few genetically modified Medaka fish glow in the dark
as they swim in a fishtank in Taipei, September 6, 2001. Taiwan aquatics
firm Taikong Group, which developed the fish, plans to start marketing
them in six months as the world's first glow-in-the dark pet.

September 5

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September 6

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September 7

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September 8

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September 9

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September 10

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September 11

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I made a brief trip over to Brenam today to pick up loan
papers for my house as all air overnight planes were grounded from the
attacks.

World Reacts with Revulsion to U.S. AttacksLONDON (Reuters) - World
leaders reacted with revulsion on Tuesday to what President George Bush
called an '`apparent terrorist attack'' by aircraft that crashed into the
World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington.

Palestinian and Israeli leaders
joined Europe in condemning the devastating attacks that caused as yet
unknown casualties.

Russian President Vladimir
Putin (news - web sites) expressed deep sympathy to the American people
``in connection with this terrorist act, this terrible tragedy.''

President Jacques Chirac
expressed outrage and assured the United States of France's support and
sympathy. ``France is deeply upset to learn of the monstrous attacks,''
he said as he broke off a regional tour to rush back to Paris. ``France
has always condemned terrorism, condemns it without reserve and thinks
we must fight terrorism by all means.''

British Prime Minister Tony
Blair (news - web sites) expressed his horror before racing back to London
from a conference in the south.

``This mass terrorism is
the new evil in our world today. It is perpetrated by fanatics who are
utterly indifferent to thesanctity of life,'' he said.
Berlin said it was shocked and said Germany's security council was convening,
chaired by Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. German air traffic authorities
said all European flights to the United States had been suspended.

``I send my condolences,
the condolences of the Palestinian people to American President Bush and
his government and to the American people for this terrible act,'' Palestinian
President Yasser Arafat told reporters in Gaza. ``We completely condemn
this serious operation...We were completely shocked. It's unbelievable,
unbelievable,unbelievable.''

Israeli Defense Minister
Binyamin Ben-Eliezer told Israel's Army Radio it was ``simply a tragedy.''
``I sympathize with the American people,'' he said. ``It's simply a terrible
thing.''

In Brussels, Chris Patten,
European Commissioner for External Affairs, said: ``We are all watching
events with absolute horror. Our prayers and deepest sympathies go out
to our friends in the United States.''

September 12

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It's sad to see a brainwashed population throwing candy
to children in the streets when another nations is shocked over a terrorist
attack.

Palestinians in West Bank Celebrate Attacks on U.S.
NABLUS, West Bank - Hundreds of Palestinians distributed sweets in the
West Bank city of Nablus to celebrate a series of aircraft attacks on two
major U.S. cities on Tuesday. Palestinian President Yasser Arafat
condemned the attacks which leveled the twin towers of the World Trade
Center in New York City and struck the Pentagon in Washington.Palestinians
who have often burned U.S. flags in protests during their 11-month-old
uprising against Israeli occupationcelebrated in the streets
of Arab East Jerusalem. ``I feel I am in a dream. I never believed
that one day the United States would come to pay a price for its support
to Israel,'' said Mustafa, a 24-year-old Palestinian gunman.Several
dozen Palestinian youths gathered in Arab East Jerusalem to celebrate as
well, honking out wedding tunes on their car horns. ``We are so happy
that America was hit. America is against us in supporting Israel,'' Suleiman,
one of the demonstrators, said.In
Nablus, motorists honked their horns and gunmen fired into the air from
assault rifles to cheer on the attacks which unfolded in the space of a
few hours and stunned people around the globe.Israel
and the Palestinians have been locked in nearly a year of fighting since
a Palestinian uprising against occupation erupted last September after
peace talks stalled.

September 13

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It's interesting to see that the market is hemoraging, but interest
rates continue to fall. Wish I had more money to invest in more real estate
property to take advantage of the difference between the 10 cap rates and
the 6% interest rates.

I ate goat today for the first time. It definitely has a unique
distinct taste. I was prepared to enjoy the meal, but thought it
would come prepared in a different form. It came looking like chicken
wings and ribs.

September 14

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State officials in Texas, Michigan, Illinois, Idaho and
several other states vowed to crack down on price gouging at gasoline service
stations. Anxiety and fear about disruptions in oil from the Middle East
led to long lines, price spikes, and, in at least in one case, a fistfight
and arrest. Stations around the country raised prices to $5 a gallon or
more after Tuesday morning’s attack on America.

Brokers said that at any one time about 50 Very Large
Crude Carriers (VLCCs) would be steaming from West Africa, the North Sea
and the Gulf to the Louisiana Offshore Oil Platform (LOOP), which suspended
operations on Tuesday. Each would carry two million barrels.

September 15

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I mulched today. Now i understand why most people pay $20 for
a 20 pound bag of mulch, when a commercial mulcher cost $120 a day to rent.

After the Horror, Radio Stations Pull Some SongsClear Channel Communications has circulated a list of
150 songs and asked its stations to avoid playing them because of the attacks
on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Clear Channel Communications, the Texas-based company
that owns about 1,170 radio stations nationwide, has circulated a list
of 150 songs and asked its stations to avoid playing them because of the
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

September 16

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I mulched today again. I ended up with 1,100 pounds of cedar
mulch in a big pile on my driveway. Not bad for 13 hours of hauling
wood to feed into the loud mulching machine.

September 17

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I was surprised to see that the stock market only dropped about 5%.
I was anticipating at least a 10% hit from the terrorist events in New
York. I am surprised that the terrorist didn't hedge the market and
get commodity bonds predicting a lower market. They could make billions
from getting those future shares prediciting a decrease on the market place.

September 18

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Upon being asked if I would go serve my county I have to stop and ponder
for a second.... I think I could be a hacker that would attack and
penetrate foreign networks and computers from the safety of my own home
or underground bunker equiped with a T3 line.

September 19

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Rodhocetus, a whale that
lived 47 million years ago is depicted based on new Eocene fossils from
Pakistan. The ankle bones indicate a close relationship of early whales
to hoofed land mammals such as hippopotami and pigs. Forefeet retain hooves
on the central digits, but hind feet with slender webbed toes indicate
that Rodhocetus was predominantly aquatic.

Fossils recently unearthed
in Pakistan show that whales evolved from land animals related to sheep
and pigs, and that hippos could be their closest living kin, scientists
said on Wednesday. How whales evolved and who their ancestors were
has been hotly debated for decades.

Scientists knew they were
related to land mammals but they have been divided on which ones because
fossil evidence of the whale's 10-million-year transition from land to
water has been sketchy.

But paleontologists have
discovered 50-million-year-old fossils of early whales that lived on land,
and ankle and skull bones from primitive aquatic whales that fill in the
gaps. ``With these new discoveries the whale fossil record is now
so complete,'' Hans Thewissen, of Northeastern Ohio Universities College
of Medicine, said.

September 20

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Maggots Crawling Back to Medicine's MainstreamYes, they're icky and disgusting.
But maggots are also being used more and more frequently as a safe, effective
means of speeding healing in patients recovering from serious wounds.
In fact, experts say the increasing popularity of maggots for wound debridement--the
removal of dead or damaged tissue and dirt from the wound surface--may
signal the resurgence of a very old treatment.
`In the first half of the 20th century, maggot debridement therapy...was
used by thousands of surgeons in hundreds of hospitals throughout the world,''
note researchers led by Dr. Ronald A. Sherman of the University of California,
Irvine. However, by the 1940s the use of maggots in debridement had largely
disappeared. A rekindled interest in alternative therapies may be
changing all that, according to Sherman's team. ``As this report was being
written, the number of US and Canadian clinicians using maggot therapy
increased to more than 100,'' they say, ''with nearly 1,000 clinicians
using maggot therapy worldwide.''
Sherman's team examined the safety, tolerability and effectiveness of outpatient
maggot debridement therapy in a group of 21 adult patients, ranging from
35 to 95 years of age. Nearly all the patients suffered from some type
of serious leg or foot wound, with eight patients having wounds so resistant
to conventional therapies that they were left with few options outside
of amputation.Writing
in the September issue of the journal Archives of Physical Medicine and
Rehabilitation, the researchers explain that disinfected larvae of either
the Phaenicia sericata or Neobellieria bullata species of maggot were placed
into the wound. The colony was then contained with a gauze wrap or cage-like
dressing and left in place for between 24 to 72 hours, after which time
it--and the maggots--were removed.Sherman's
group reports that in 17 of the 21 patients, maggot therapy completely
or significantly debrided the wounds, with significant healing occurring
within a few weeks after treatment, ``even though most of these wounds
had failed to respond to three or more conventional (treatments) administered
for 6 months or longer.'' Eleven of the treated wounds healed completely
without the need for additional surgical procedures, the study authors
add, including seven that healed within 6 months. Two patients did go on
to require amputation despite successful debridement.The
majority of patients had few qualms about receiving outpatient maggot therapy,
with just eight expressing serious concern. Some worried that the maggots
would escape into their homes or in public, and one patient remained so
anxious about this that treatment had to be discontinued. Other patients
worried that they might not receive immediate attention for pain or other
complications. Pain was treated successfully with oral analgesics, and
no patient discontinued treatment due to discomfort or ineffectiveness.
However, ``two physicians and three patients complained about foul odors
during therapy,'' the investigators report. Nevertheless, the use
of maggots in wound healing is finding increasing acceptance among physicians
in the US and elsewhere. ``In addition to being safe and effective,''
the authors note, outpatient maggot therapy also ``makes good fiscal sense''
because it gives the patient round-the-clock healing without the need for
expensive hospitalization or surgery.

September 21

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America Unmasked as a Paper Tiger
by Ted RallNEW YORK -- "Power is an
illusion," columnist Jimmy Breslin wrote during Watergate. At no time in
our lives has that truism been more evident.The demise of the Soviet
Union, we know as surely as we can know anything nowadays, left us Americans
in charge of the planet. What we never considered was how little it took
to bring down our rival superpower: the CIA dumping dollars on the floors
of Moscow lavatories to destabilize the ruble. A nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl.

It happened to Afganistan.
Now it's happening to us. Integral to the shaking fists and the flag-waving
hysteria and the funerals -- thousands and thousands more of those to come,
by the way -- is a rage born of impotence. Conservatives applaud and liberals
deplore our expensive governmental monitoring systems -- what would we
have argued about had we known that neither the CIA nor the NSA knew what
was going to go down Sept. 11? For what does it profit a country to starve
its schools if its fattened Pentagon can't even protect its own headquarters
from a terrorist attack?

The United States has finally
been unmasked as the greatest Potemkin ever conceived -- "great magnificent
shapes, castles and kingdoms," in Breslin's words. Or to paraphrase Edward
G. Robinson's classic diss of Fred MacMurray in "Double Indemnity": We
thought we were smart, but wewere wrong. We're just a
little bigger. Air-traffic controllers realized fairly quickly that
those four jets had been hijacked. American Flight 11,out of Boston, took 46 minutes
to hit Tower One of the World Trade Center. United Flight 175 struck Tower
Two 65 minutes after leaving Boston.

Most damning, American Flight
77 was aloft a total of 88 minutes -- nearly an hour and a half -- making
it from Washington/Dulles to southern Ohio en route to Los Angeles before
turning around. Math: The flight did a 180-degree turn at least 44
minutes away from the Pentagon. Why weren't our F-16s on top of that plane
within 10 minutes? Why wasn't it shot down during the next 34 minutes after
that? The answer, sheepishly admitted and buried deep amid the assorted
tales of horror, was that there is no policy for forcing down a civilian
airliner.

Unless, of course, there
was. The Air Force denies shooting down United Flight 93, which crashed
and burned in Shanksville, Pa., the government's silence certifying called-in
media stories of heroic passengers rebelling against their captors. Those
accounts, however, are cast into doubt by thegovernment's refusal to
release the plane's voice cockpit recorder tapes to the public. It's a
safe bet, after all, that a bold struggle for control would at least make
it out in transcript form. So it's possible that Bush or other officials
made a terrible, yet courageous, decision to act; if so, the need to keep
it secret provides ample testimony to the aftermath of last year's election-that-never-was:
If Bush is the perfect president for this time, he's the empty-headed embodiment
of our national cluelessness.

America's embarrassment of
embarrassments continues apace. CIA superspooks admit that their posse
of white Mormons from Utah never learned Pashto or Tajik, Afghanistan's
two principal languages. The loss of four planes and a few days of airport
closures decimate the biggest airline industry in the world, resonating
through the economy in the form of the biggest stock-market crash ever.
Half a dozen buildings accounting for less than 1 percent of New York City's
office space vanish; the national economy plunges decidedly into recession
and beyond. What would we do if we really were at war? How can the
richest superpower in the history of mankind have been brought so low by
18 guys?

The United States, it turns
out, entered the 21st century atop a crumbling house of cards. When the
Soviet Union went away, we lost the ideological and economic competition
that had kept us sharp after World War II. We became complacent, smug and
arrogant. History, Francis Fukuyama told us in 1993, had ended. Global
free-market capitalism, epitomized and led by U.S. corporations, represented
the pinnacle of achievement of historical evolution.

A power vacuum opened in
Central Asia. Afghanistan disintegrated into civil war, anarchy and religious
madness. Surrounding republics -- Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Pakistan
-- were sucked into a vortex of instability and anti-Western sentiment
fueled by clumsy U.S. attempts to suck all the oil out of the region without
paying off any of the locals. This, and America's blank check to Israel,
inspired tens of thousands of militant Muslims to their facile conclusion:
Sometimes the bull in the china shop won't leave voluntarily. That's when
you kill it.

Osama and his jihad boys
sized us up fairly well. Behind the high-tech metal detectors in our airports
were underpaid incompetents. Manning our tactical defenses were dimwitted
dolts devoid of imagination. Bolstering our outsized economy was a mountain
of debt and an easily spooked securities market. And behind the boast that
the World Trade Center could withstand a collision with a jumbo jet was
the horrible, awful truth: No amount of bluster can cancel out basic physics.
As the cliche goes, we believed our own hype and now we're paying the price.

Our close-to-the-bone brand
of capitalism turned out to be our economic Achilles' heel. Corporations
that fill metal tubes with highly combustible fuel and upper-middle-class
citizens and propel them eight miles over the surface of the Earth at high
speeds ought to be prepared for an occasional mishap, but they're not --
and neither are insurers who are, after all, in the business of risk appraisal.
A week of reduced productivity has ruined crops (no crop dusters during
the flight ban) and trashed the economies of states dependent on tourism.

This, since George W. Bush
and his tax-cutting maniacs have forgotten, is why governments and companies
both need savings and surpluses. "It's my money," Republicans like to say,
"and I can use it better than the government can." Worst of all, decades
of increasing disparity of wealth have made it impossible for ordinary
people to help out the only way they really could, by spending discretionary
income. Now that we've let them steal all of our money, where are all the
jobs rich people are supposed to create? This is the way empires end, with
a bang and a whine.

September 22

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I installed my bathroom light fixtures today. I attempted to
start cleaning and renovating my upstairs bathroom. A simple cleaning
of the walls ended up being a 4 hour endever. I had to remove all
the old wallpaper and then scrub the walls with bleach to get rid of the
mildue residue. After doing wall paper on one wall I decided to stop
and see what other things needed to be done. At least my bathroom
has a nice clean smell now.

September 23

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Catholic Church Shuts Down OrgyRIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (Reuters)
- A three-day sex orgy just steps away from Rio de Janeiro's famous tropical
beaches has been canceled at the request of Brazil's Catholic Church, party
organizers said on Saturday.``The Catholic Church filed
a complaint with the city government and it was canceled, but it will happen
in 10 to 15 days in a bigger and better complex because attendance has
increased by a lot,'' said Alice Oliveira, a spokeswoman for Brazil's Hedonist
Club, which is hosting the bash. It was canceled on Friday night.

The party had been scheduled
for a large sauna and brothel complex called Venus Prateada (Silver Venus)
in the beachside Rio suburb of Recreio. Prostitution is legal in Brazil.
Oliveira said the city government shut down the event because Venus Prateada
lacked a license to operate but that the Hedonist Club had all the right
paperwork to throw the party.

``We were expecting 1,500
people per day for this weekend's party,'' Oliveira said. ``But since it's
been in all the Brazilian (news - web sites) media, the demand for tickets
has increased by a lot. So we don't even know how many people we'll have.''

Organizers said the proportion
of men and women at the party was being controlled via ticket sales to
keep a relative parity. Anyone age 18 or over can buy tickets for between
$20 and $35.

September 24

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September 25

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We had the first real cold front come through, so I spent a few hours
caulking my windows and doors. I still have yet to do much with my
1000 pounds of mulch on my driveway.

September 26

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Seems that you can't even trust your bank these days to be efficient
and timely in providing you service. After it taking the bank 3 months
to decide to approve the loan, it has taken another 3 weeks after all the
papers are signed for the loan to be closed. Yet now they have booked
the loan, (I now owe them the loan amount of $30,000) yes it has not been
funded, ( I don't have another dime in my name). So after spended
a good 2 hours at the bank they decided I was telling the truth & they
still didn't know where the bank check ended up.

September 27

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Well the money finally showed up today. I'm temporarily $30,000 richer.
I paid the first construction chck to my contractor to start the remodeling
process next week. I've been struck by a image.... three stories
sounds awfully nice. To have another loft room upstairs on each side
and gain a view of the downtown area. Maybe more than just a dream...
only time will tell.

September 28

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September 29

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I moved the 1100 pounds of mulch from my front driveway to my backyard.
It was a 5 hour processes with 2 people doing the work. I also chopped
down another cedar tree. That brings the total up to 8 trees that
I have chopped down.

September 30

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Today I went rock hunting again. Maybe one more load of rocks
and I'll have enough to do my dry creek and waterfall design I came up
with.